As a child, I was deeply struck by stories of raccoons and foxes caught in leghold traps who chewed off their own limbs in order to free themselves. My instinctive horror at the cruelty of such traps flowed from a deep sense of empathetic identification with the trapped animals: I felt the trap, gripping ever more persistently; I felt the rising tide of panic and desperation, the struggle to break free, at whatever cost. Whence this yearning for freedom? And what significance does its multispecies expression hold?
Freedom offers a powerful lens for multispecies ethical reflection. The value of freedom correlates with the presence of agency; where there is agency or potential agency, flourishing requires a commensurate freedom for the exercise of that agency. Where there is agency, flourishing cannot simply be bestowed but requires self-involvement. The forms that this self-involvement takes are many, correlating with varied forms of agency. This also means that freedom can be infringed upon in manifold ways. A lion that is not only caged but also fed ground meat is deprived not only of its freedom of movement but also of its agency in securing its own food; a goat penned up in a tiny enclosure of grassy ground continues to munch freely on grass even as it is denied freedom to roam; it retains more dimensions of agency and freedom than the lion.
It is a commonplace that the German Idealist tradition is centrally concerned with the meaning and achievement of freedom. Insofar as that tradition seeded Marxist theory, critical theory, liberationist movements, and more, the theme of freedom has continued to animate broad swaths of philosophy and social theory ever since. Yet these traditions focus on distinctively human forms of freedom: freedom as autonomy, as self-determination, as reason-giving answerability (Pinkard 2002, 282–283; 366–367). Considering freedom and agency through a multispecies lens allows us to arrive at a more adequate account.
The new materialists have had illuminating things to say about the quasi-agency of natural forces and objects (e.g., Latour 1993, 136). Agency proper, however, is a feature of living things. To be alive is to exist in a constant process of exchange, communication, and flow; living organisms are bounded but permeable, open to and dependent on the world, existing in a state of what Hans Jonas called “needful freedom” (1966, 80). They are autopoietic systems, in which there is a “peculiar circular interdependency between an interconnected web of self-regenerating processes and the self-production of a boundary, such that the whole system persists in continuous self-production as a spatially distinct individual” (Thompson 2007, 101). A living thing is self-producing; this is the heart of its agency. Yet no living thing is truly solitary or independent, free from other organisms or its material surroundings. And Jonas, building on the rich vein of philosophical anthropology developed by Max Scheler, Helmut Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen, rightly argued that increased organizational complexity correlates both with increased degrees of freedom and of dependency.
Logically successive stages of organic complexity reflect the intensified realization of tendencies inherent in prior stages. Any life form exists by way of a boundary between self and other, and differentiates between what is good for and bad for its ongoing self-production. Where there is sentience, these distinctions become salient to the organism itself (Godfrey-Smith 2019, 15). Sense organs and nervous systems, give rise to experiences of the world and of self in relation to the world. Moving through space, seeing, hearing, feeling the world in relation to its own body in space, an animal so equipped acquires sentient subjectivity as an added dimension of agency; it acts in a world that feels and matters to it in various ways. Pain signals a threat to autopoietic processes; for the trapped fox, its Umwelt, its life-world, becomes a world of torture. Unable to disentangle its limb from the trap, its agency is employed in gnawing off the limb that now represents the most intense site of that agony.
Through language, the human animal has become self-conscious, aware of its own subjectivity and able to reflect on the subjectivity of others—not just to feel with the fox in agony (as do other foxes) but to regard oneself feeling-with-the-fox. This form of life, which Plessner characterizes as “ex-centric,” grasps all life as relationship-with and enters the world of language as a shared world. This is the world that Hegel named as objective spirit, “where relations-with not only exist but where the relationship-with has become the constitutive form of a real [wirklichen] world where the emphatic I and you merge into the we” (Plessner 2019, 286).
Language-using creatures become capable not merely of feeling and responding to that which is good but also of articulating this goodness to others. They become capable of a new degree of freedom and self-determination characterized by the capacity to act on the basis of judgments concerning what is genuinely as opposed to merely apparently good. This new degree of freedom does not, however, involve a transcendence that leaves behind the needful character of organic freedom. Rather, it involves an intensification of dependency, which now also includes dependence on a shared world of concepts in and through which one is held responsible for one’s freedom. New degrees of freedom go hand in hand with new degrees of dependence; new dimensions of agency bring with them new dimensions in which agency can fail. This includes forms of failure that are attributable to the agent—not just failure but sin, evil.
Situating human freedom and agency within the context of more-than-human forms of freedom and agency helps to correct false understandings of freedom as independence and underscores the fact that complex forms of freedom predicated on the prior existence of simpler forms of freedom also carry with them heightened vulnerability. This can correct human exceptionalism without turning a blind eye to the distinctive features of language-using animals. It also provides a basis on which a more pluralistic account of creaturely dignity can be developed.
Situating human freedom and agency within the context of more-than-human forms of freedom and agency can correct false understandings of freedom as independence. The possibility of complex forms of freedom is predicated on the prior existence of simpler forms of freedom and carry with them heightened modes of interdependence and vulnerability. Recognition of the dialectic of freedom and dependency can correct human exceptionalism without obscuring the distinctive forms of freedom and agency that are possible for language-using animals. This paper develops such an account in dialogue with the philosophical anthropology of Helmut Plessner, Hans Jonas’s notion of “needful freedom,” and contemporary philosopher of biology Evan Thompson’s understanding of the autopoietic character of living organisms in constant exchange with their surroundings.